Abstract
Arendt had little interest in the question of women in the philosophical canon. But her concept of natality and its links to reflections on difference, contestation, and multiplicity have struck a chord with many contemporary (and feminist) philosophers. Through her historical and theoretical examinations of the conditions for human life, political life, and ethical life—and for their transgressions—she has become a powerful intellectual figure. Her concept of natality, which focuses on the role of plurality, newness, and spontaneity for political life, offers distinctions and priorities that provide a necessary orientation for reflecting on the contemporary refugee crisis. In an Arendtian spirit, we must defend a conception of an open political sphere that is constantly renewed by newcomers, and that is not reducible to social or cultural identities, in order to protect refugees as obligated by both international conventions and moral relations.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Bonnie Honig rejects the standard view that this phrase refers to sexual difference. She claims, “La petite difference is an intra-sex/gender difference” which characterized Rosa Luxemburg’s difference from other women, “the refusal of membership, the choice of difference or distinction over a certain kind of equality (Honig 1995a, b, 151).”
- 3.
This view of women’s issues aligns with her commitment to distinguish social questions from political questions, a view which she also maintained in her controversial 1959 essay on desegregation, “Reflections on Little Rock”.
- 4.
Arendt thought there was nothing intrinsically masculine or feminine about the public realm; similarly, she would reject the view that thought places demands to think in a masculine or feminine way. In this respect, she would differ with Beauvoir’s view that in common usage as well as in scientific thought, “man represents both the positive and the neutral…whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity” (Beauvoir 1952/1974, xviii).
- 5.
The following four paragraphs are drawn from Schott (2010, 54–5).
- 6.
The difficulty in communicating extreme pain is the subject of Elaine Scarry’s book, The Body in Pain Scarry 1985).
- 7.
Arendt began to address the notion of beginnings in her doctoral dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, which was published in German in 1929. She introduced the term natality in The Human Condition, published in 1958. When she set about revising her dissertation for English publication in the 1960s, she inserted the term natality in the earlier text to clarify her discussion of beginnings (Arendt 1996). In the first translation of this passage from her dissertation Arendt writes, “Because the world, and thus any created thing, must originate, its being is determined by its origin (fieri)—it becomes, it has a beginning.” In the revised version Arendt writes instead, “To put it differently, the decisive fact determining man as a conscious, remembering being is birth or ‘natality’, that is, the fact that we have entered the world through birth (Arendt 1996, 132–3).”
- 8.
However, below I will argue that this distinction can be very important in reference to the protection of political rights of refugees.
- 9.
In a similar vein, Foucault distinguishes Nietzsche’s genealogy from a search for “lofty origins.” Rather, genealogy follows descent: “it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself (Foucault 1977, 143, 147).”
- 10.
Which doom is also implied by the use of the hydrogen bomb, as Arendt points out.
- 11.
In “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason” Kant writes, “the human being is evil, cannot mean anything else than that he is conscious of the moral law and yet has incorporated into his maxim the (occasional) deviation from it.” (Kant 1793/2001, 9). And, “This evil is radical, since it corrupts the grounds of all maxims….” (Kant 1793/2001, 83).
- 12.
Arendt reminds us that if one murders, then one has to live with a murderer for the rest of one’s life. This, however, might be more manageable than she fathomed. See, for example, Joshua Oppenheimer’s film, “the Act of Killing” on the mass murders in Indonesia in the 1960s, in which he asks perpetrators to re-stage their crimes.
- 13.
Google search on July 6, 2016.
- 14.
1350 migrants drowned during the course of just one week in April 2015.
- 15.
If one established local areas from which people could seek asylum, it would also help correct for the gender imbalance that emerges when young, single men are more apt to take the dangerous journey.
- 16.
Larking suggests this is a sad echo of the abdication of responsibility of governments in Western Europe during the inter-war period. It was the police who took over responsibility for refugees, and they were given license to act with impunity (Larking 2014. 133).
- 17.
In January 2016, during a rampage against foreigners in the train station in Stockholm, a Swedish teenager was attacked because he had dark hair.
- 18.
Since the civil wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, it has been widely recognized that the imperative “Never Again” has not had the force to stop crimes against humanity and genocide. It may, however, retain force as a regulative ideal to guide moral and political experience.
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Schott, R.M. (2020). Arendt, Natality, and the Refugee Crisis. In: Thorgeirsdottir, S., Hagengruber, R. (eds) Methodological Reflections on Women’s Contribution and Influence in the History of Philosophy. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44421-1_10
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